by James Hynes
“Oh, alright.” Paul settled back in the narrow little seat, feeling more effervescent by the minute. “I’ll play along.”
“They’re going to demand a sacrifice from you tonight.” Bob Wier grimly maneuvered through the dark with both hands on the wheel.
“It’s a kind of hazing, right?” said Paul, blithely. “You guys are going to paddle me or something.”
“It’s the hardest thing you’ll ever do.” Bob Wier’s expression was unreadable in the dark. “Take your wife, your only wife, whom you love, and offer her as a burnt offering.”
“What?” said Paul. “What’d you say?” The buzz of the golf cart reverberated off the cave walls. “What book of the Bible is that?”
“The Book of Bob,” said Bob Wier.
“Well, it’s not funny,” said Paul. “I don’t want it in my dream.”
“I offered her up, thinking, you know, at the last minute the angel of the Lord would intervene.” Bob’s voice was barely audible over the whirr of the motor and the crunch of the tires. “But He didn’t come. God let me down, Paul.” Bob Wier choked and looked away. Paul glanced at him, but all he saw was Bob’s silhouette against the glow of the headlights.
“But then, to be fair,” Bob Wier said, “I’m no Abraham.”
After that they rode in silence, and Paul crossed his arms and sulked. The cart passed several turnoffs and branchings of the cavern, and Bob Wier always took the widest path. The damp breeze blew stronger in their faces, and the walls moved farther back from the pathway, so that much of the time the dim little headlamps illuminated only the pebbled surface of the wide path, with nothing but darkness beyond. This is getting boring, Paul thought, and after a glance at Bob Wier to make sure he wasn’t watching, Paul surreptitiously pinched himself in the thigh, trying to wake himself up. I’d rather be watching Born Free, Paul thought, than riding a golf cart into hell with Bob Wier.
But then he saw a glow up ahead, an illuminated patch of rock beyond the headlights, and Bob lifted his foot from the accelerator and let the cart’s motor grind down to a stop just before a curve. A steady light shone from around the bend, and Bob switched off the ignition and stepped out of the cart, gesturing in the dim light for Paul to follow. Around the curve Paul found himself in the upper reaches of an enormous natural amphitheater, where a rubbled floor descended to meet the sloping ceiling at a narrow point far below. The room was thickly forested with dripping stalactites hung from above and soapy bulges of flowstone below. Some of these formations had joined in the middle, forming slender, gray-green columns, smooth and knotted like long strands of nerve tissue. A mellow light came from all around, from bulbs set in nooks and crannies and linked by loops of fat cable.
Bob Wier led Paul down a narrow path that wound between the columns and the stalactites, and Paul had the feeling that he was walking through the strings and lumps and tissues of somebody’s brain. My brain, he decided. That’s where I am. I’m dreaming of a journey to the center of my own head. He laughed aloud with delight. This dream was turning out to be a concatenation of every subterranean narrative he’d ever read or seen, from highbrow to lowbrow and every brow in between, a Mixmastering of Dante and Jules Verne, of Tom Sawyer and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, of the Mines of Moria and the Hall of the Mountain King. He looked up and was well pleased with the fecundity of his subconscious. The ceiling was forested with pale, almost translucent soda straws, and seamed with small stalactites like jagged mountain ranges seen from above. To either side, in niches like private boxes at the farther reaches of the amphitheater, the formations were growing together like connective tissue, and out of these crannies the pale faces of homeless guys watched Paul. He thought he heard a steady murmuring; it wasn’t the usual—“Are we not men?”—but something else that he couldn’t make out.
The air was cooler as they descended but more humid, and Paul thought he smelled something other than the dank air of the cave, something that reached to the back of his nostrils. But he couldn’t place it, and he mopped his forehead and flung the sweat away from his fingertips. Bob Wier had sweated a wide streak down the back of his polo shirt, and he seemed to be gasping even more than the exertion demanded. They had reached the lowest circle of the amphitheater, where a passage led to an even brighter chamber beyond. The wind was coming from that narrow gap, and Paul thought gleefully, what next? Trolls? Dinosaurs? A Balrog? The circle of panders, seducers, and flatterers?
“Hey, Bob,” said Paul. “Mind if I call you Virgil?”
Bob Wier stopped and glanced with wide-eyed anxiety back up the slope. Paul turned too, to see several pale men with flashlights trooping down the path from above—How’d they get here so fast? Paul wondered, then thought, fuck it, don’t ask, it’s a dream—while others filtered out of the crannies, stepping carefully down the slope around the soapy bulges of stalagmites. Their murmuring was getting louder, but Paul still couldn’t make out what they were saying. He turned to go forward again, but Bob Wier held him back with a hand on his shoulder and fixed him with an intent gaze. He lifted his hand from Paul’s shoulder and turned it palm up, offering Paul the ignition key of the golf cart.
“Take it,” he said in a low, urgent voice. “Take it and go back the way we came. It’s not too late for you.”
“Maybe Virgil’s too formal,” Paul said, still determined to get into the spirit of things. “How ’bout just ‘Virge’?”
“I beg you,” breathed Bob Wier, his eyes filling with tears, “in the name of Christ Jesus, go back now. I’m going to hell, but you still have a choice.” He essayed a trembling smile. “ ‘Work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you.’ ” He swallowed hard and said, “Philippians, chapter two, verses twelveand thirteen.”
Paul’s smile faded, and his next remark—“Don’t be a buzz-kill, Bob”—faded on his lips. He glanced down at the key in Bob Wier’s trembling palm, but then it was too late, as the gathering tide of pale men reached the bottom of the path.
“What is the law?” they were murmuring. “What is the law?”
They flowed around Paul and Bob Wier, and with the mild pressure of their hands swept both men through the passage into the next room.
THIRTY-EIGHT
THE PASSAGE WAS LOW AND NARROW AND S-SHAPED, and Paul could not see what was ahead, only the glow of electric lights. Having decided that all this—the caverns, the pale men, the torment of Bob Wier—were features of a dream, still Paul was surprised and a little alarmed to follow Bob Wier around the final curve of the passage into an aisle running between the gray upholstered walls of cubicles on either side, under bright, fluorescent fixtures. At first he assumed that, following the peculiar logic of a dream, he was now wandering the aisles of the General Services Division of TxDoGS. But the lights were much brighter, and as he squinted against the glare he noted that the fabric of the cubes was mottled and streaked with damp; that the thin carpet under foot was lumpy and uneven, a thin padding over hard rock; and that the faces of the men rising from their desks all around him were not the faces of his coworkers in the world above but those of pale, homeless men, their glasses glaring in the light, their milky skin gleaming through their buzz cuts. The cube walls came up to Paul’s cheekbones, as they did at TxDoGS, and he saw the bulbous heads rising from the centers of cubes all around him, some taller than others, some broader in the forehead, but all with the same blank gaze. Because of the glare of the lights, Paul could not tell how far the cubes receded into the distance. Straight ahead, past the cringing shoulders of Bob Wier, he saw that the aisle ended in a T, and that at the intersection of the two aisles an iron pole crusted with reddish rust rose straight up into the air. Next to the pole waited Boy G, his arms hanging straight at his sides, his glasses pushed all the way up his nose, his pens lined up, his name tag neatly centered over his breast pocket.
The faces peering over the cube horizon on either side all turned to follow Paul’s progress up the aisle, and he glanced back
to see the men who had followed him down the amphitheater crowding up the aisle behind him. The murmuring grew louder as the men in the cubes joined in.
“What is the law?” they muttered. “What is the law?”
As he got closer to the intersection, Paul noticed that the iron pole was a sort of ladder, with L-shaped iron rungs protruding at right angles, at alternate heights on either side; unlike the rusty central pole, the rungs were worn smooth to a dull gray sheen. Paul glanced up, but the top of the pole was lost in the glare of the lights. The tang he’d detected in the air in the amphitheater was sharper here, like the smell of burning oak.
As they reached the junction of the aisles, Bob Wier stepped to one side, and Boy G’s gaze fell on Paul, who felt a tremor of cold up his spine.
“Who are you?” whispered Boy G in his toneless voice.
Paul sweated under the lights, in the clammy humidity of the cavern. He felt the pale men crowding behind him.
“Myself?” he said, uncertain what else to say.
Boy G turned his magnified eyes to Bob Wier, who licked his lips and glanced from Boy G to Paul. “He’s a man,” Bob Wier said.
“A man! A man! Like us!” murmured the pale men behind him. Out of the corner of his eye, Paul saw the pale faces above the cube horizon nodding in agreement.
“He’s a man,” Bob Wier said again. “He must learn the law.”
“Say the words,” murmured the men all around. “Say the words.”
Paul felt the chill tightening his skin. I wonder if it’s too late, he thought, to get that key from Bob.
Boy G turned and walked up the perpendicular aisle to the right, and Bob Wier followed, gesturing curtly for Paul to follow. Paul turned to see if he could go back, but the pale men in the aisle were pressing forward, murmuring, “Say the words, say the words,” while the other pale men began to filter out of their cubes into the aisle, murmuring, “A man like us, a man like us.”
“Um, Bob?” said Paul, edging up the aisle. “Could I talk to you for a second?”
But Bob Wier ignored him, and Paul had no choice but to follow. Suddenly the cubicles ended on either side, and Paul found himself walking on the cave floor again. Beyond the glare of the fluorescent lights he saw ahead of him a vast, oval cavern of creamy yellow rock, like custard, its ceiling dripping with stalactites and soda straws and other, more delicate formations like hanging draperies. Water dripped in an irregular rhythm from above; Paul felt the tap of droplets on his scalp and his wrist. Along the left side of the cavern, across a wide, shallow pool of clear water, were three huge formations in a row. The one closest to Paul was a creamy hillock like a huge lump of melting vanilla ice cream. As from a leaky tap, water dripped from a cluster of thin, bladelike projections above, then pulsed in shallow waves down the broad, soapy slopes of the hillock into the pool. The formation farthest from Paul, at the end of the cave, was like an eroding sand castle, a clotted cluster of blunted stalagmites that rose nearly to the dripping roof. And, in the middle, was the tallest and most striking formation, a long, curved, blunt-ended column that stuck out of a wide, conical base of flowstone and rose in layers of long, saber-fanged stalactites nearly to the ceiling. It looked, depending on your point of view, like an enormous stack of decaying wedding cake, or a giant, sagging candle, or—as Paul, the ex-husband of a gender theorist, couldn’t help noting—a giant, erect, rotting phallus. The column’s reflection in the clear water of the pool trembled with each drop of water from above.
“Professor!” cried a voice, and Paul turned to see Colonel approaching him from the right side of the cave. “You’ve joined us at last!” Colonel was wearing his office kit—dress shirt with sleeves rolled down and cuffs buttoned, tie knotted firmly up under his dewlaps—and he joined the procession and pumped Paul’s hand firmly and warmly.
“A big night, son!” His face was flushed, whether with whisky or excitement, Paul couldn’t tell. “We’ve been preparing for your feast.”
He threw his arm around Paul’s shoulders, squeezing him tight and gesturing towards several rows of long, folding tables along the right side of the cavern. Each table was covered with a long, checkered tablecloth and lined with mismatched chairs. At regular intervals along each table stood a little skyline of salt-and-pepper shakers; rolls of brown paper towels upright on spindles; and bottles of hot sauce, jalapeños, and barbecue sauce. At the far end another table was set crosswise, where Paul recognized the landscape of classic Texas barbecue: stacks of paper plates and plastic utensils; potato salad and coleslaw in big plastic bowls; a metal bowl heaped with pickles; wedges of cheese, tomato, onion, and avocado on wide platters; loaves of white bread still in their plastic wrappers; a pair of sweating aluminum urns of iced tea; and a big Crock-Pot of beans, plugged into a fat, orange extension cord that snaked away into the recesses of the cave. At one end of the table stood a squat plastic barrel full of Dr. Pepper, Big Red, and Shiner Bock on ice.
“Yo!” cried J.J., who stood behind the farthest table in jeans and t-shirt and a baseball cap, tending to two large barbecue smokers, each an enormous black metal drum on four legs with a firebox like a low, square snout at one end. The floor of the cave was on a slight incline, tilted to the left, and the front wheels of each smoker were chocked with wedges of wood to keep them from rolling across the cave into the pool. J.J. wore an apron, not like some suburban backyard chef, but like a pro, the string wrapped around his waist and tied at the front. Black smoke puffed from the little chimney at the end of each smoker, staining the stalactites above with soot, and as Paul watched, J.J. lifted a short length of oak from a neat stack of logs.
“Hope you brought your appetite, dude!” J.J. said, and he opened the front door of the firebox of one of the smokers with a rag and fed the oak into the hot, hellish glare of the fire, shoving the log deeper with a long, iron poker. This isn’t so bad for a dream, Paul thought. As a Yankee, he wasn’t as enthusiastic about barbecue as some, but he didn’t mind a plate of smoked brisket and hot sausage now and then. The only odd thing was, all Paul detected from the smokers was the burning wood, not the warm, fatty aroma of slow-roasting meat. J.J. kicked the firebox shut and set the poker to one side with a bright clang. Whatever they were having, J.J. hadn’t even started cooking it yet.
“Now it’s time to do your bit,” said Colonel, bracing Paul around the shoulders and walking him slowly up the cave at the head of the procession. “There’s a little bit of, well, ritual involved, but nothing you can’t handle.” Bob Wier and Boy G fell in a step or two back. “It’s kind of an initiation rite.” Colonel’s avuncular tone had an edge of mischief in it, like a winking frat boy leading a pledge into a darkened room. “And, of course, it’s also our way of thanking these boys for everything they do for us.”
Colonel guided Paul towards the central, phallic formation, while from behind came the shuffle and scrape of many feet, and the steady susurrus of murmuring, all of it punctuated with the plink of water in the pool and reinforced by the swelling echo of the cave.
“It’s the price we pay, Paul,” murmured Colonel. “Mind you, it’s not their steady diet, but let’s just say they’ve developed a taste for what we can provide them.” At the edge of the pool Colonel stopped and gently but firmly propelled Paul forward. Reluctantly, Paul stepped onto the first of a series of stepping stones in the water, each a big, thick, fried egg slice of stalagmite. The water trembled with each step, and at last Paul stepped gingerly onto the slick, creamy surface at the conical base of the giant column.
“My boy!” cried a voice, and he looked up to see Stanley Tulendij stepping out from behind the column. He was wearing a frayed, faded, powder blue tuxedo with wide lapels and bell-bottom trousers. It was the sort of thing a teenaged boy might have worn to the prom twenty-five years ago, which made it simultaneously antique looking and much too young for Stanley Tulendij. Even in the garish tux he kept his spidery aspect—the trousers were too short for his long, peculiarly jointed legs, while the
jacket was too big. His head wobbled on top of his long, thin neck, which didn’t even come close to filling the voluminous collar of his frilly shirt. He came to the middle of a wide ledge at the base of the column, and his flat jaw split in a wide smile. He spread his arms, his bony hands sticking out of the wide, empty cuffs of his jacket.
“We’ve been waiting for you!” he said. “You’ve been the apple of our eye.”
The murmuring of the pale men rose to a rumble, and Stanley Tulendij lifted his voice. “And now, gentlemen! Colleagues! Fellow Texans! Our lovely new queen!”
The murmuring diminished almost to silence, and just as Paul was thinking nothing else could surprise him, Olivia Haddock stepped out from behind the phallic column, wearing a faded, red velvet prom gown, with red satin gloves that ran over her elbows and a little, clear plastic tiara. The velvet was worn away in long creases down the folds of the skirt, while the bodice was a little tight on Olivia, squeezing her bosom bloodless. She wore a fraying, yellowed sash across her shoulder that read VIKING QUEEN CWNHS HOMECOMING 197—” The rest of the date was lost around the curve of her hip. She stood next to Stanley Tulendij on the ledge, one foot placed before the other, her red satin palms pressed together before her sash. In the breathless silence she scowled down the slope at Paul.
“You’re late,” she said.
With one foot on the slope of the cone, Paul goggled at the sight before him. This dream was turning uncomfortably strange. Indeed, with the unexpected appearance of Olivia, the dream seemed to be turning into a nightmare. She had disappeared only a week ago, and now she was not only alive and well, but somehow, in the foreshortened time of Paul’s dream, she had become queen of the underworld. Paul glanced back, chilled to his spine, and immediately behind him he saw bright-eyed Colonel urging him forward with a nod, while a stricken Bob Wier wrung his hands. Behind them clustered a frighteningly large crowd of pale, homeless men in white shirts, ties, and glasses, their pale scalps gleaming through their stubbled hair, their lips pulled back from their sharpened teeth as they began to murmur again, “A man like us. Say the words.”